A twenty‐person working group convened to discuss the ethical and policy considerations of the controversial intervention called “growth attenuation,” and if possible to develop practical guidance for health professionals. A consensus proved elusive, but most of the members did reach a compromise.

A twenty‐person working group convened to discuss the ethical and policy considerations of the controversial intervention called “growth attenuation,” and if possible to develop practical guidance for health professionals. A consensus proved elusive, but most of the members did reach a compromise.

BackgroundSarcomas are a diverse group of neoplasms that vary greatly in clinical presentation and responsiveness to treatment. Given the differences in the sites of involvement, rarity, and treatment modality, a multidisciplinary approach is required. Previous literature suggests patients with sarcoma suffer from poorer quality of life especially physical and functional wellbeing. Adolescent and young adult patients are an underrepresented population in cancer research and have differing factors influencing QoL.MethodsRetrospective analysis of Young Adult patients enrolled in the Sarcoma Tissue Repository at (...) University of Iowa. QoL was assessed using the self-report FACT-G questionnaire at enrollment and 12 months post-diagnosis; overall scores and the 4 wellbeing subscales were calculated. Linear mixed effects models were used to measure the association between the rate of change in FACT-G subscale scores and baseline clinical, comorbidity, and treatment characteristics.Results49 patients were identified. 57.1% of patients had a malignancy involving an extremity. Mean FACT-G scores of overall wellbeing improved from baseline to 12 months. Social and emotional wellbeing did not differ significantly between baseline and 12 months. Physical wellbeing and functional wellbeing scores improved from baseline to 12 months. No difference was seen for FACT-G overall scores for age, sex, laterality, marital status, performance status, having children, clinical stage, limb surgery, chemotherapy, or tumor size. A difference was demonstrated in physical wellbeing scores for patients with baseline limitation compared to those with no baseline limitation. A difference was demonstrated in social wellbeing based on anatomical site.ConclusionYoung adults with sarcoma treated at a tertiary center had improvements in overall reported QoL at 12 months from diagnosis. Overall baseline QoL scores on FACT-G were lower than the general adult population for YA patients with sarcoma but at 12 months became in line with general population norms. The improvements seen merit further investigation to evaluate how these change over the continuum of care. Quality of life changes may be useful outcomes of interest in sarcoma trials. (shrink)

Vaccination complacency occurs when perceived risks of vaccine-preventable diseases are sufficiently low so that vaccination is no longer perceived as a necessary precaution. Disease outbreaks can once again increase perceptions of risk, thereby decrease vaccine complacency, and in turn decrease vaccine hesitancy. It is not well understood, however, how change in perceived risk translates into change in vaccine hesitancy. -/- We advance the concept of vaccine propensity, which relates a change in willingness to vaccinate with a change in perceived risk (...) of infection—holding fixed other considerations such as vaccine confidence and convenience. (shrink)

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to learn and navigate through environments. One potential source of this variation is “directional sense” or the ability to identify, maintain, and compare allocentric headings. Allocentric headings are facing directions that are fixed to the external environment, such as cardinal directions. Measures of the ability to identify and compare allocentric headings, using photographs of familiar environments, have shown significant individual and strategy differences; however, the neural basis of these differences is unclear. Forty-five college students, (...) who were highly familiar with a campus environment and ranged in self-reported sense-of-direction, underwent fMRI scans while they completed the Relative Heading task, in which they had to indicate the direction of a series of photographs of recognizable campus buildings (i.e., “target headings”) with respect to initial “orienting headings”. Large individual differences were found in accuracy and correct decision latencies, with gender, self-reported sense-of-direction, and familiarity with campus buildings all predicting task performance. Using linear mixed models, the directional relationships between headings and the experiment location also impacted performance. Structural scans revealed that lateral orbitofrontal and superior parietal volume were related to task accuracy and decision latency, respectively. Bilateral hippocampus and right presubiculum volume were related to self-reported sense-of-direction. Meanwhile, functional results revealed clusters within the superior parietal lobule, supramarginal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and caudate among others in which the intensity of activation matched the linear magnitude of the difference between the orienting and target headings. While the retrosplenial cortex and hippocampus have previously been implicated in the coding of allocentric headings, this work revealed that comparing those headings additionally involved frontal and parietal regions. These results provide insights into the neural bases of the variation within human orientation abilities, and ultimately, human navigation. (shrink)

We provide a new criterion for embedding.

We generalize the [Formula: see text] dichotomy to doubly-indexed sequences of analytic digraphs. Under a mild definability assumption, we use this generalization to characterize the family of Borel actions of tsi Polish groups on Polish spaces that can be decomposed into countably-many Borel actions admitting complete Borel sets that are lacunary with respect to an open neighborhood of the identity. We also show that if the group in question is non-archimedean, then the inexistence of such a decomposition yields a special (...) kind of continuous embedding of [Formula: see text] into the corresponding orbit equivalence relation. (shrink)

We give classical proofs, strengthenings, and generalizations of Lecomte’s characterizations of analytic ω-dimensional hypergraphs with countable Borel chromatic number.

We sketch the ideas behind the use of chromatic numbers in establishing descriptive set-theoretic dichotomy theorems.

We show that there is an antichain basis for neither the class of non-potentially closed Borel subsets of the plane under Borel rectangular reducibility nor the class of analytic graphs of uncountable Borel chromatic number under Borel reducibility.

We show that recurrence conditions do not yield invariant Borel probability measures in the descriptive set-theoretic milieu, in the strong sense that if a Borel action of a locally compact Polish group on a standard Borel space satisfies such a condition but does not have an orbit supporting an invariant Borel probability measure, then there is an invariant Borel set on which the action satisfies the condition but does not have an invariant Borel probability measure.

Since 1984, the philosophy for children (p4c) Hawai‘i movement, a partnership between the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM) and Hawai‘i’s public schools, has experienced success in creating a more philosophical schooling experience. UHM’s Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education supports this movement by offering a ‘Philosopher in Residence’ who aids teachers in bringing philosophical inquiry into practice (Lukey 2013). Philosophers in Residence continue to support p4c Hawai‘i at Kailua High School, Waimānalo Intermediate and Elementary School, and Waikīkī, (...) Ka‘elepulu, and Sunset Beach Elementary Schools. As the movement grows, we continually ask, how can we support teachers in making p4c a ‘living and reliable educational option’ (Lipman 1988, p. vii) with limited resources? One solution is the philoSURFER Internship Project, where pre-college students intern with university Philosophers in Residence and assist kindergarten through to ninth grade teachers in ‘doing’ philosophy with students. Kailua High School started their first philoSURFERS cohort in the fall of 2015, and Sunset Beach Elementary School adapted the model and had their first cohort of philoSURFERS in the fall of 2021. Since 2015, 151 philoSURFERS have supported over 65 teachers and thousands of students at eight schools to engage in philosophical inquiry. The aim of this academic reflection is to share the lessons the five authors and project coordinators have learned over the last eight years of this school-university partnership for other organisations interested in utilising pre-collegiate students as catalysts for making philosophy an integral aspect of our schools. (shrink)

We provide a finite basis for the class of Borel functions that are not in the first Baire class, as well as the class of Borel functions that are not $\sigma $ -continuous with closed witnesses.

We generalize Kada’s definable strengthening of Dilworth’s characterization of the class of quasi-orders admitting an antichain of a given finite cardinality.

I argue that we cannot fully understand Aristotle’s position on political stability and state preservation in the Politics with paying close attention to his Eudemian Ethics. We learn from considering the Politics and the Eudemian Ethics in concert that even ‘correct’ regimes are unstable when citizens do not possess full virtue. Aristotle introduces his formal account of the knowledge requirements for virtue in Eudemian Ethics 8.3, and he applies these knowledge requirements as an explanation for state decline in Politics 2.9 (...) when discussing the Spartans. If we primarily focus on the Nicomachean Ethics as Aristotle’s single essential ethical work, we will not learn the lesson he intends his readers to take away from the Spartan discussion in the Politics: that virtue requires correct understanding of the hierarchy and structure of the good life. This knowledge prevents the erosion of the virtues of character and the decline of political regimes. (shrink)

We establish Hjorth's theorem that there is a family of continuum-many pairwise strongly incomparable free actions of free groups, and therefore a family of continuum-many pairwise incomparable treeable equivalence relations.

We show that if add(null) = c, then the globally Baire and universally measurable chromatic numbers of the graph of any Borel function on a Polish space are equal and at most three. In particular, this holds for the graph of the unilateral shift on [N]N, although its Borel chromatic number is N₀. We also show that if add(null) = c, then the universally measurable chromatic number of every treeing of a measure amenable equivalence relation is at most three. In (...) particular, this holds for "the" minimum analytic graph G₀ with uncountable Borel (and Baire measurable) chromatic number. In contrast, we show that for all κ ∈ {2, 3...., N₀. c}, there is a treeing of E₀ with Borel and Baire measurable chromatic number κ. Finally, we use a Glimm—Effros style dichotomy theorem to show that every basis for a non-empty initial segment of the class of graphs of Borel functions of Borel chromatic number at least three contains a copy of (R<N, ⊇). (shrink)

We simultaneously generalize Silver’s perfect set theorem for co-analytic equivalence relations and Harrington-Marker-Shelah’s Dilworth-style perfect set theorem for Borel quasi-orders, establish the analogous theorem at the next definable cardinal, and give further generalizations under weaker definability conditions.

In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

The dominant unspoken philosophical basis of medical care in the United States is a form of Cartesian reductionism that views the body as a machine and medical professionals as technicians whose job is to repair that machine. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for an alternative philosophy of medicine based on the concept of healing relationships between clinicians and patients. This is accomplished first by exploring the ethical and philosophical work of Pellegrino and Thomasma and then by connecting (...) Martin Buber's philosophical work on the nature of relationships to an empirically derived model of the medical healing relationship. The Healing Relationship Model was developed by the authors through qualitative analysis of interviews of physicians and patients. Clinician-patient healing relationships are a special form of what Buber calls I-Thou relationships, characterized by dialog and mutuality, but a mutuality limited by the inherent asymmetry of the clinician-patient relationship. The Healing Relationship Model identifies three processes necessary for such relationships to develop and be sustained: Valuing, Appreciating Power and Abiding. We explore in detail how these processes, as well as other components of the model resonate with Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. The resulting combined conceptual model illuminates the wholeness underlying the dual roles of clinicians as healers and providers of technical biomedicine. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that health care should be focused on healing, with I-Thou relationships at its core. (shrink)

This anthology of articles provides contemporary international feminist perspectives on issues of identity, agency, and difference as they pertain to both feminist politics in particular, and contemporary western politics more generally.

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits (...) Kristeva's reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual inoculation" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection. (shrink)

Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller’s reply to my article helpfully clarifies their position and our main points of disagreement. Their view is that those who blame hypocritically lack the right to blame for a violation of some moral norm N in virtue of having an unfair disposition to blame others, but not themselves, for violations of N. This view raises two key questions. First, are there instances of hypocritical blame that do not involve an unfair differential blaming disposition? Second, (...) if the answer to the first question is Yes, do hypocritical blamers of this kind lack the right to blame? In this paper, I argue that the answer to the first question is Yes. Given this, Fritz and Miller’s account faces serious problems regardless of whether the answer to the second question is Yes or No. (shrink)

Hypocrisy is a ubiquitous feature of moral and political life, and accusations of hypocrisy a ubiquitous feature of moral and political discourse. Yet it has been curiously under-theorized in analytic philosophy. Fortunately, the last decade has seen a boomlet of articles that address hypocrisy in order to explain and justify conditions on the so-called “standing” to blame (Wallace 2010; Friedman 2013; Bell 2013; Todd 2017; Herstein 2017; Roadevin 2018; Fritz and Miller 2018). Nevertheless, much of this more recent literature (...) does not adequately address the question, “what is hypocrisy?” In this paper, I develop and defend an account of hypocrisy as vicious, value-expressing inconsistency. I show how this account solves some traditional and some novel philosophical puzzles concerning hypocrisy and affords a deeper understanding of the features of hypocrisy emphasized by other prominent accounts. (shrink)

A poem encrypts, though not predictably, the effects it may have when at some future moment, in another context, it happens to be read and inscribed in a new situation, in ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx. In Wallace Stevens's ‘The Man on the Dump’ (1942), we are told: ‘The dump is full/Of images’. The poem's movement is itself a complex temporal to and fro that aims to repudiate (...) and even annihilate these images. This renunciation leaves the man on the dump ‘The Latest Freed Man’, as the title of another Stevens poem puts it. Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, he has his back toward history and has rejected its images in ‘disgust’ in order to face toward a future that will, he hopes, be purified of ideology. Yet Stevens knows that more such images will come and will need in their turn to be rejected and junked, in an endless task of purification. In a now impossibly outdated way, Stevens nevertheless wanted the poet – that is, himself, the man on the dump – to be the begetter of a new ideology, or a new fiction that would, in a powerful speech act, replace all those outworn images on the dump. In the context of potentially catastrophic climate change (as the result of something like a global auto-immune disorder), the second part of the essay complements this commentary on the poem with a free reading; a performative reading, reading as work or as oeuvre that does something with words, for which Jacques Derrida calls. This reading sees Stevens's text as somehow the proleptic foretelling of a present situation. Such future chiming is also, it is argued, a sign to sign relation, an anticipatory allegory or prophecy, or, perhaps, a miniature apocalypse in the etymological sense of an enigmatic unveiling of what has not yet happened. (shrink)

The major findings by Libet et al. are briefly summarized. The criticisms and alternative proposals by Trevena and Miller, Pockett, and Gomes are analyzed and found to be largely unwarranted.

Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a (...) decision not to move. There was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation. We conclude that Libet’s results do not provide evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. (shrink)

In our 2018 paper, “Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame,” we offer an argument justifying the Nonhypocrisy Condition on the standing to blame. Benjamin Rossi (2018) has recently offered several criticisms of this view. We defend our account from Rossi’s criticisms and emphasize our account’s unique advantage: explaining why hypocritical blamers lack the standing to blame.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 56-58, June 2012.

Edited collection on Wittgensteinian ethics. With contributions by Oskari Kuusela, Edward Harcourt, Anne-Marie Christensen, Sabina Lovibond, Alexander Miller, Benjamin De Mesel, Cora Diamond, Lars Hertzberg, Jeremy Johnson, Craig Taylor, Alice Crary, Lynette Reid.

Introduction to our edited volume on Wittgensteinian ethics with papers by Oskari Kuusela, Edward Harcourt, Anne-Marie Christensen, Sabina Lovibond, Alexander Miller, Benjamin De Mesel, Cora Diamond, Lars Hertzberg, Jeremy Johnson, Craig Taylor, Alice Crary, Lynette Reid.

At least since Benjamin Constant gave a speech on the subject in 1819 at the Athenee Royal in Paris, there has been occasional debate over the exact character of ancient democracy. This debate lives on today in a spirited and lively exchange going on largely among ancient historians over the character of Athenian democracy, particularly on its political and theoretical articulations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate two specific aspects of this debate, namely the understanding Athenian citizens (...) - and particularly democratically inclined Athenian citizens - had of equality and liberty of speech, and their linkage in the Athenian mind. It is argued that the Athenian notion of equality and free speech were linked with liberty, and are not entirely dissimilar to modern understandings of the same concepts. (shrink)

: When may a physician legitimately offer enrollment in a randomized clinical trial (RCT) to her patient? Two answers to this question have had a profound impact on the research ethics literature. Equipoise, as originated by Charles Fried, which we term Fried's equipoise (FE), stipulates that a physician may offer trial enrollment to her patient only when the physician is genuinely uncertain as to the preferred treatment. Clinical equipoise (CE), originated by Benjamin Freedman, requires that there exist a state (...) of honest, professional disagreement in the community of expert practitioners as to the preferred treatment. FE and CE are widely understood as competing concepts. We argue that FE and CE offer separable and, in themselves, incomplete justifications for the conduct of clinical trials. FE articulates conditions under which the fiduciary duties of physician to patient may be upheld in the conduct of research. CE sets out a standard for the social approval of research by institutional review boards. Viewed in this way, FE and CE are not necessarily competing notions, but rather address complementary moral concerns. (shrink)